15.11.03

14.11.03

13.11.03

Play is the engine that drives true learning

Created in the early 19th century by German educator Frederick Froebel, the 'gifts' were intended to teach kindergarten children about the principles of geometry and the discipline of design.
American architect Frank Lloyd Wright often noted the profound effect the ten exercises or 'gifts' had upon his development as an architect.

...closing
the distance, adjusting
the angle, black-and-white
verb to the flock's blackfooted
milling. How long after these canids
willingly approached our fires
did it take for some magus
to train one up to these workaday
marathons, this serious play
that involves everything from
pick-up-sticks to a log-roller's
quickstep over the backs
of Charolais built like a herd
of tractors?

12.11.03

Martin 'Yellow Dog' Amis:But it all comes under the heading of — and this is what I’ve always been writing about — masculinity and what a paradoxical state it is. It’s a constant trade-off, and not with the conscious mind. The real paradox about masculinity is that it rests on potency and the ability to have an erection, and now that that’s chemically available, and — though no one’s whispered a word of it yet — what that will do to masculinity is truly revolutionary.
In what way?
Well it should take away the main cause of male insecurity. As someone says, "There will be no more wars."
—Philip Higgs—Martin Amis/Nerve

Ω{Years back I was a militant anti-smoker. As a teenager. It was a boot camp for the unpopular truth-holder. You're nuts. Shut up. Cars too. Shut up. Years back. Years and years. Lots of stuff. Not that it gives me that automatic scissor-clearance, but, you know.
I don't care about offshore Viagara or whether my Johnson's mammoth enough, that isn't the issue. It's the aftermath that concerns me.
A long time ago I said prostitution was a bad thing. Not because of the sex, but because it sanctifies money. Men with money can breed on, or, its functional equivalent, have sex with, women that without the money they couldn't, or women representing those women. Ipso facto, money makes the difference. Ipso facto, because breeding is a paramount feature of biological presence, money is sacred. To those men.
Amis is right about the dynamic but wrong about the terms. Masculinity, like feminity, like humanity, is a fluid category, it's just that the flow is so long-term and slow it seems static. It is not static. A sudden shift in reproductive fortune and the essential qualities of maleness, femaleness, human-ness, will have changed substantively.
The bower-bird carries this principle home to us, the bull-frog, the baboon, the octopus bring it as well. These mating gestures, these dances, evolved. They weren't there, then they were. Things change.
It is a truism that humanity's characteristics are locked in some inalterable template. Certain kinds of men benefit from that truism's acceptance. Certain kinds of men will benefit from chemically-enhanced erectile function. Others won't. The ones who choose not to will be marginalized to the edge of extinction.
Once again we get shoved into the crossroads at rush hour, nothing but traffic as far as the eye can see, forced into a binary dilemma whose terms are equally repellent. This is the same bogus 'progress' that has greased our way to the edge of full-species extinction.
Is it just collateral damage that the compensatory technologies employed to give the handicapped an equal footing tend to handicap the able?
There's still this sense of nobility and purity around Olympic athletes representing the best of human grace and ability, and consequent sanctions against performance-enhancing chemistry. But back in the real world anything goes. Which one's more important, in the long run?

There's an Escherian quality to this road we're on that's fascinating.}

11.11.03

...dropping through the nothing both
a major urban metroplex and a sesame seed are, under the rings
of their atoms. In a comic strip today, the phone starts shrilling;
the dog goes “Ruff Ruff Ruff”; the phone stops; and the dog thinks
“See? If you bark long enough, that thing shuts up.” Yes, funny;
and pathetic. In one lovely 18th-century engraving,
the corpse’s muscles from shoulder to butt are opened outward
like the petals of a rose: and we hold tightly to the ladder of ribs...

10.11.03

9.11.03

Walt Whitman: first response to Anne Gilchrist's offer of her hand in marriage

...My book is my best letter, my response, my truest explanation of all. In it I have put my body & spirit. You understand this better & fuller & clearer than any one else. And I too fully & clearly understand the loving & womanly letter it has evoked. Enough that there surely exists between us so beautiful & delicate a relation, accepted by both of us with joy.

CROW: So ya' wanna be a rocker. Study the moves. Jerry Lee Lewis. Buy some blue suede shoes. Move yer head like Rod Stewart. Put yer ass in a grind. Talkin' sock it to it, get the image in line. Get the image in line boy. The fantasy rhyme. It's all over the streets and you can't buy the time. You can't buy the bebop. You can't buy the slide. Got the fantasy blues and no place to hide.